JOHN P. DIGGINS
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made up of conceptual propositions whose meanings depended upon the
defining nature of ideas themselves - not as a playboard of signifiers. To
him it was the world beyond language that mattered, not the Declaration
of Independence as a "metanarrative" but the "spirit of '76" and the
"blood sacrifices" the document entailed.
Curiously, the subject of leadership seems to have been discredited in
American scholarship with the arrival of the sixties generation in academe.
Older scholars like James MacGregor Burns and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
had drawn from their studies of FOR and the New Deal lessons about the
importance of leadership to a democracy. But Benjamin Barber, Director
of the Walt Whitman Center for the Study of Democracy at Rutgers
University, charges that older New Deal liberals have mistaken the value
of leadership for the virtue of citizenship, thereby reducing people to
"passive observers whose main public activity is applause." Enamored of
the sixties mystique of participatory democracy, Barber regards leadership
as elitist and star-gazing, when politics should be egalitarian and actively
self-governing. Barber's essay, "Neither Leaders nor Followers:
Citizenship under Strong Democracy," is prefaced by two seductive
aphorisms: "Strong leaders make a weak people" (Emile Zapata) and
"Some say 'pity the country that has no heroes'; I say 'pity the country
that needs heroes'" (Bertolt Brecht) .
"Political philosophy," Georges Sorel observed, "becomes muddled
whenever it is concerned with democracy." The muddle remains as long
as we accept as a self-sufficient proposition such assumptions about
democracy. Does "strong democracy" guarantee strong people simply
because they have been redescribed as virtuous citizens? Tocqueville ob–
served that "the courtier spirit" was more widespread in democratic
America than in monarchist Europe, rendering potential citizens servile
and conformist. Emerson and Thoreau doubted that political democracy
nurtures a strong sense of self; instead, it brings on spiritual alienation
which succumbs to material acquisition. Other observers have viewed
democracy as encouraging herd-instincts, thereby thwarting the develop–
ment of aristocratic spirit and nobility of the soul (Nietzsche); issuing in
mass standardization, routine monotony, and complacent mediocrity
(Ortega y Gasset); rendering the politician prisoner of the populace
(Burke); encouraging pride, group egotism, and obliviousness to the
plight of others (Niebuhr), to the point that democratic masses are inca–
pable of recognizing their sinful nature (Lincoln).
For all its complaints against commercial society, the sixties generation
scarcely has seen that contemporary democracy itself, based on the whims
of popular preference, is a matter of fashion on the part of voters and
packaging on the part of candidates. With campaign strategists selling their
candidates, democracy takes on the features of a commodity transaction,
